Is weight loss the same as weight control? When you are not in control of something, you find it difficult to maintain it where it is. When you are not in control of your weight, you tend to lose weight or gain weight. So when you are in control of your weight, you would be able to maintain your weight more or less steady or gain or lose it as you will.
Unfortunately with over sixty-five percent of U.S adults being either overweight or obese, majority of the people confuse weight control with weight loss. The confusion is worse confounded because the considerations by which you achieve weight control are the same as those by which you achieve weight loss.
A healthy American woman of medium build and a height of 5’ 4” would weigh about 125 lbs. If she is doing a little or no exercise, she needs 1500 calories per day to maintain that weight. If she were to follow some dietary restriction and reduce her calorie intake by 500 calories per day, she will lose weight at the rate of about 1 lb per week.
If the woman in our example above were to start exercising for 3 days per week, she will be burning off about 200 calories per day more and to maintain the weight i.e. to control the weight in spite of starting on the exercise regimen she needs to eat 200 calories more per day.
So as you see from the above, it is not difficult to choose your lifestyle and maintain a healthy weight gain or healthy weight loss. You choose the weight you want to scale at; that tells you how long you need to adjust your lifestyle to reach the target at the safe rate of 1-2 lbs. per week (of course, keeping in mind general health considerations). Next determine what is your present calorie intake (there are so many websites that can help you find your actual intake if you feed in the details of your diet). Knowing that one pound of body weight is equivalent to about 3500 calories, you can decide how much change you need to make in your calorie intake. Choose any of the safe natural diet plans to implement the changes in diet required. Just remember less fat, less calories, lose weight; more fat, more calories, gain weight!
How many calories a day to lose weight?
If you are eager to lose weight, a good rule of thumb is that a caloric deficit of 3,500 calories leads to a weight loss of approximately one pound. Therefore, you could begin by taking five hundred less calories day, providing you are taking a healthy, well-balanced diet and performing your physical activity / exercises regularly. Simply saying, to get rid of one pound per week, you need to reduce your calories by 500 per day. There are two simple ways of doing this; eat / drink 250 lesser calories daily and burn additional 250 calories by performing physical exercise (e.g. walking or jogging for 2 to 3 miles daily).
Another way to cut back on calories is to watch your portion sizes. Go for relatively smaller, leaner, pieces of meats, perhaps. Eat as much vegetables as possible as they are low in calories but contain higher quantities of vitamins and nutrients) and avoid deep fried food (cheese burgers, fried chicken, French fries etc.). Doing these easy things will have a dynamic impact on your weight.
If you are at a healthy comfortable weight you can easily maintain the same weight even in face of changes in your activity levels, etc. by keeping in mind underlying concept. If you are increasing your activities (including exercise you may be doing) increase your calorie intake correspondingly or vice versa. Remember the effects of calorie intake or burn out are on a cumulative basis; for effective weight control you don’t have to strictly maintaining a daily balance sheet.
